On June 5, 1981, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control published the first description of a mysterious disease in gay men that would later be named Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Thirty years later, AIDS has killed more than 25 million people worldwide and changed American institutions ranging from drug research to dating and diplomacy. Click on the image above for a graphic overview of the impact of the illness. Below are articles from today and the past looking at the progress of the disease over the years.

On June 5, 1981, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control published the first description of a mysterious disease in gay men that would later be named Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Thirty years later, AIDS has killed more than 25 million people worldwide and changed American institutions ranging from drug research to dating and diplomacy. Click on the image above for a graphic overview of the impact of the illness. Below are articles from today and the past looking at the progress of the disease over the years.

Waheedah Shabazz-El represents the trajectory of an epidemic that has infected more than one million Americans and 60 million people worldwide since a weekly federal report first described a mysterious disease in five gay men 30 years ago on Sunday.

It has circled the globe. It has spread farther, faster than any plague in history. On Oct. 21, 1987, teams of Inquirer reporters and photographers around the world recorded its impact - the toll it takes on whole communities, its power to reshape social behavior, its resistance to every effort to control it. Their reports give a view of humanity's most frightful disease, on a global scale and in the compass of a single day.

Vomit as political prop was Scott Tucker's idea. He has this wit that acts up. He's an angry man and he means business, but if you get past the megaphone, the blistering rhetoric, the stark gray crewcut, black leather jacket, silver pirate earring and combat boots, there's this impish glint in his eye - the face of a former choirboy who just dreamed up something deliciously bad.

This breakthrough might save the lives of people once doomed by an hiv-positive diagnosis.

What the young biochemist Nancy E. Kohl saw in her microscope in 1988 was the start of an eight-year quest that would lead to the most effective AIDS drug yet developed - a drug so promising that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved it in record time.